Living Photographs

This is a test I shot to try out a software program called Cinemagraph Pro. It can be used to create a gif file from a selected portion of a short motion picture. It fairly straight forward. First, a locked off camera is used to shoot a short motion picture. This clip is edited to length for the motion desired and the resulting is clip imported into the program. A single frame of this clip is chosen to function as the still photograph that the movement will be visible within. If desired, this hero frame can be exported to a photo editor such as Photoshop, worked on and then re-imported into Cinemagraph. Next, a painting tool is used to mask off the areas where the motion will be allowed to show through in the still photograph. A .gif file is built from this. I chose to make the above gif small so that it will load fairly quickly. It’s an interesting effect, but I’m not sure how much I’ll use it.